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International Holocaust Remembrance Day

By Staff | Jan 27, 2017

Today marks the International Holocaust Remembrance Day – a day established to honor and commemorate the millions of victims of the Holocaust.

On Jan. 27, 1945, the Soviet Union liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death-camp complex in Poland as part of the Allies of World War II. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated that Jan. 27 – the anniversary of the liberation – would serve as a day of remembrance.

Among those to survive the horrors of the concentration camps was the now-deceased Benjamin Rubin, father of Cape Coral resident Celia Rubin. Rubin lectures at local schools, sharing his story.

“My dad and I didn’t really start talking about it (the Holocaust) until I was in my 30s,” she said. “I think, at that time, he probably knew he needed to tell somebody his story before he forgot it.”

“Before that, really though, he never talked about it,” Rubin said.

Born on Jan. 2, 1918, in Poland, Benjamin Rubin grew up an Orthodox Jew, learning to become a baker at his family’s bakery. He was around 18 when he first started working in a Polish work camp.

“That was before the actual Nazi concentration camps started,” she said.

“He was able to go home on the weekends,” Rubin added. “It wasn’t bad yet.”

But, things began to get worse. Nazis took over the works camps, then Jewish homes and businesses. Jews were placed into Polish ghettos, before eventually being shuttled off to concentration camps.

Members of his family were sent off in small groups to the concentration camps – his parents, grandparents, seven siblings and cousins. Her father was about 19 or 20 when it was his turn.

“They all didn’t go at once,” Rubin said. “It was a selection process.”

“So many of them thought, how could this be happening to them?” she added.

According to her father, many went along with what they were told thinking it would be OK.

“But it wasn’t,” Rubin said.

In the camps, he was taught masonry work before the Nazis learned he was a baker.

“That’s how he survived,” she said. “Because he was a strong young man and could provide a service to the work camps at that time.”

In 1996, Steven Spielberg and the Shoah Foundation project sent a film crew to Rubin’s house to interview her father. Rubin explained that the project is a collection of Holocaust survivors’ stories.

“Each survivor is their own story,” she said.

The team asked that he tell his story in Polish, but he chose to do it in English.

“He never was a big talker. He was an observer,” Rubin said.

“It was a tough interview for him,” she added. “He smiled through it, but I could tell that it was not a smile of joy. It was a nervous smile.”

During the interview, Rubin’s father speaks of the horrors of the camps. He tells the story of standing in the food line one day and asking for more food, before being clobbered in the head with a soup ladle.

“It cracked his skull open,” she said.

Then, there were the box cars.

“He talks about how they’re shuttled about in cattle cars from one camp to another, and how they kept warm by using corpses in the cattle cars to block the chill,” Rubin said.

At times, they would cover themselves with the corpses in an effort to stay warm.

“My father tried to escape at one point,” she said of the concentration camps. “They cut off his fingers, up to the first knuckle on his first hand – one of the tailors in the camp sewed his fingers up.”

Rubin’s father was 27 when the concentration camps were liberated.

“He spent seven years in the camps,” she said.

As news spread of the camps being liberated, the Nazis moved to cover their atrocities.

“They (the prisoners) were made to start crushing the bones left in the crematories, so they didn’t leave evidence,” Rubin said, noting that the final camp that her father was imprisoned at was Auschwitz.

“He was actually on a death march when the camps were liberated,” she said.

According to experts, the genocide known as the Holocaust resulted in the death of about 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million children. This represented two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population.

Some include the additional 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Nazi mass murders, including ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet citizens and POWs, Romanis, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, homosexuals, and those with mental and physical disabilities – raising the total to 11 million.

In the two years following his liberation, Rubin’s father spent awhile in the hospital.

“Most of them needed medical care,” she said of the survivors.

Afterward, he searched for his missing family through the European Red Cross and word-of-mouth. Fortunately, he tracked down one of his brothers – the only other one to survive besides himself.

“His youngest brother died two days before the camps were liberated,” Rubin said.

At the age of 29, her father immigrated to the United States.

“He had the clothes on his back, one extra shirt, his important papers and a pocket-full of small money that the European Red Cross gave him,” she said.

He eventually ended up in Detroit, working at a small Jewish bakery.

“He learned English,” Rubin said. “But we also spoke Yiddish and Hebrew.”

Growing up the daughter of a Holocaust survivor had its challenges.

“My dad had night screams, terrors,” she said.

He had the No. 172066 inked on his arm.

“I didn’t even know my father’s tattoo wasn’t our phone number until I was 5,” Rubin said, noting that a school assignment to learn it led to that realization. “That’s how I started learning about the Holocaust.”

Over the years, her family attended Holocaust remembrances. Her father was invited to attend the grand opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1993.

“I think they (the survivors) came out of the camps two ways. They were either very very bitter or they saw the glass half-full,” Rubin said. “My dad never treated anybody different throughout his life.”

While today marks the worldwide day of remembrance, she thinks of it every day.

“I think those of us who have lived through it with their parents would understand that,” Rubin said. “It’s great that we have one day for it to remember, but I think we need to remember it every day.”

About six years ago, she began lecturing at local schools on the subject, incorporating her father’s interview for the Shoah project. Rubin was able to preserve a DVD of the interview through Legacy Republic, a digitization service. It allows her to save and access the material online via the Cloud.

“When I go to the lectures, I tell them about the overthrow, why they picked the Jews,” Rubin said, noting that she shares stories from her father not on the video. “I facilitate a conversation with them.”

She added that people need to look at how they treat one another in today’s times.

“I think it’s a time to really reflect on where we are as a society and where we’re going as a society,” Rubin said. “We need to start not teaching hate.”

To schedule Rubin for a lecture, contact her by email at crubin813@aol.com.